Check your instagram engagement rate by Elle-May Michael
If you’re a maker, artist or any business owner, you can gain a huge amount of insight from just checking your engagement rate every week.
It’s a little nudge to get you thinking analytically about what you are posting, and gives you confirmation that your audience LOVES what you’re doing! And that’s what we all want right? An engaged audience who love what we’re doing and show us with likes, comments, saves and reshares?
I use a tool called PHLANX, which is super easy to use and gives you a percentage score, and your average likes, comments and your current follower count. I then transcribe it into a spreadsheet every Monday along with all my other metrics to make sure I am keeping my marketing on-point and use it as an opportunity to revise before planning what to do for my business during the week.
As tiny businesses with limited budgets, we need to learn how to harness free social media to make it work for us.
If you would like to track more data, such as your website analytics, facebook, pinterest and ad spend data you might like to check out the free Marketing Tracker I have made for creative businesses!
Or, if you wanna start small and just start by checking your Instagram engagement rate each week, read on!
How To Find Your Instagram Engagement Rate
Follow along this post for steps on how to find your instagram engagement rate and what to do with the information!
What Is An Engagement Score?
It’s a figure calculated by counting up your posts, likes, comments, saves and other metrics to give you a percentage score. Your Instagram Engagement score provides you with a top level overview of how your audience is engaging with your content.
- What is considered a “good” engagement rate varies depending on how many followers you have. The below graph can be used as a guide for what you are aiming for! As you can see, more followers means less engagement overall.
Average Engagement Rate on Instagram from Phlanx.com
In my experience, most creatives under 1,000 followers sit in the 15% – 25% range, if you’re sitting in this range you’re either KILLING IT, or you have lovely friends and family who love you dearly 🙂
How keeping track of your engagment rate will help you
Checking your engagement regularly helps you know if your messaging is resonating with your audience.
Sometimes, what you think people want to see is not what they want to see! Or sometimes, what you want to post, isn’t the content which is going to delight your audience the most! Many makers and artists fall into the habit of only showing product and not showing their face for example, and their engagement score directly correlates with the content being posted!
I ran a challenge with our Cube Fam called the #cubergridchallenge in 2020, and every maker found that the week we posted several pictures including their faces that their engagement went up massively! Here’s what one cuber said
I’ve gone from an average of 5 comments to an average of 13, a reach from 634 to 995, and an engagement rate of 6.52 to 7.60
Really happy with how things have turned out, it makes sense as what to post about now, 3.5% engagement to 7.74%
I’ll go more into what content gets better engagement in another post. Keep an eye on the Instagram Tips for Artists series for that one!
To check your rate, I Recommend PHLANX.
You can access the PHLANX Engagment Calculator here… I find it the most reliable engagement calculator, and it’s simple to use without requiring you to create an account! Woohoo!
Use whatever you like, however I suggest that you pick one, and stick to it… as different calculators may give different results.
Enter Your Insta Handle And You’re Done!
Run the tool by putting in your instagram handle. You’ll then be provided four metrics which you can enter into your tracker.
- ENGAGEMENT RATE
- AVERAGE LIKES
- AVERAGE COMMENTS
- TOTAL FOLLOWERS (TODAY)
We all know that likes and comments mean people like what you’re posting, as do saves, reshares and other things people can do to take ACTION on your post. And your engagement rate is a calculation taking all of those things into account.
Repeat Weekly!
Yes, weekly… Just set yourself a reminder for the day of the week you’re most likely to have time to do it. You can do it from your phone and screenshot the result if you’re out and about then enter it into your Marketing Tracker later!
Doing this weekly is going to give you a great overview of how your content is going. You’ll notice increases, and decreases, and can adjust your content for the week accordingly!
BONUS TIP! Comparing And Analysing.
For BONUS points, keep track of two other small businesses with the same Niche as you
This isn’t about copying or comparing, but about giving you a realistic figure to work towards, and knowing your position in the market!
If there’s a maker out there you think is killing it… check their rate! Check it every week, and then see what they did to get the result they had (less or more, it’s all informative). Then have a think about how that relates to your content!
NOTE: Try to choose people with a similar number of followers as different follower counts will get different results. Generally, the more followers the lower engagement.
No Judgement Here!
Don’t Be Judgemental About The Figures, Just Use It As A Way To Try New Strategies And See What Is Working.
I used to get so down on my terrible engagement rate when I was just posting product and not engaging with my audience. But then I started checking it regularly, and thinking long and hard about what was working and what wasn’t and I was able to increase it by 9x in a few months (and keep it there).
It’s still a work in progress, as Instagram changes things up on the regular… but if you’re keeping track if what’s going on, the big changes don’t seem so scary anymore 🙂
This post is part of my Instagram Tips for Artists series.
You might like to check out some of the other articles, or follow along on my Instagram page where I have regular artist Q&As and chat sessions! I also work 1:1 with makers and artists to help them grow their brands and provide group mentoring every day to the Cube Fam! Get in touch if you would like to know more about crafting your biz with us!